Yes, the Radeon HD 4890 seems to be the current efficiency winner, at least if your goal is playing modern games... which if it isn't... why are you buying a 3D card?

I went over the performance numbers and power consumption for about 80 different cards on various review sites, and found not only the above power numbers, but also that the 4890 is near the top in all single-card reviews, but if you turn Anti-Aliasing on, it CRUSHES the competition. With maximum Anti-Aliasing settings (hard to find many performance numbers with this enabled), the 4890 is way out ahead of any other single-card, single-GPU configuration. For whatever reason, ATI's approach lays waste to nVidia's once Anti-Aliasing is turned up. And obviously going dual-card or dual-GPU shoots your power usage sky high.

I've long felt that the difference for pixel-based art is anti-aliasing. Pixar's movies have always looked so good in part because of the extreme levels of anti-aliasing applied from the very beginning.

I now have my 4890 running in a 350w system, and can for example play Spore with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering both turned to maximum and the framerate sticks at 60 (the max because I have VSync enabled). And the graphics are gorgeous.

Yes, the Radeon HD 4890 seems to be the current efficiency winner, at least if your goal is playing modern games... which if it isn't... why are you buying a 3D card?

What about the 4770? Using the power draw numbers above, and the 3dMarks score from Tom's Hardware,

HD 4890: 19912 3dMarks / 120.3 watts = 166 3dMarks per watt

HD 4770: 14528 3dMarks / 49.5 watts = 293 3dMarks per watt

It's to be expected that the 4770 will win in performance per watt, because it's the only card available using the newest/smallest GPU technology. Also, stock fanless editions are on the way, which is nice.

I don't know the relation between the sites, xbit is russian IIRC and both articles have the same author.

Ha-ha! Well, the explanation is simple. Xbitlabs is just like a RussiaToday, a proKremlin TV-channel that works for West world only (and says only good things about Russia), so is the Xbitlabs, that presents mainly Russian articles to English reading audience. Xbitlabs was founded by an ex-worker from very weighty Russian site http://www.ixbt.com. He went to http://www.fcenter.ru/ team, then after a while seeing lack of interest for IT reviews in Russia established Xbitlabs. So the articles you read are first written in Russian, then translated to English. Just for anyone information

I even did a search for this article (about consumption), cause I know that it should appear on Xbitlabs, but didn't find it, so thank you, Mats, for finding!

So the articles you read are first written in Russian, then translated to English. Just for anyone information

Aha, I always thought there was something strange about the language used on xbitlabs, it's generally perfect English, but some choices of words seem odd to a native English speaker. Now it all makes sense.

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